Friday, August 05, 2005

Further comments on ID.

I was reading over that article on Bush again, and felt compelled to comment on this particular comment:

"With the president endorsing it, at the very least it makes Americans who have that position more respectable, for lack of a better phrase," said Gary L. Bauer, a Christian conservative leader who ran for president against Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries. "It's not some backwater view. It's a view held by the majority of Americans."

This DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACTS. When are people going to get that through their heads? Intelligent Design is NOT Scientific. AT ALL. It does NOT deserve, even remotely, the same credibility which Evolutionary Theory has SCIENTIFICALLY EARNED.

The majority of Americans believed that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. The majority of Americans believed that Saddam was behind 9/11. The majority of Americans hold many MANY ignorant views about the world based on a lack of research and a lack of understanding. They naively take the word of people like Bush or of their Pastors, Preachers, Fathers etc. FACTS have since proven that Saddam did NOT have WMD's... Saddam did NOT have ANYTHING WHATSOEVER to do with 9/11 or with Al Queda, nor was he harboring or supporting terrorists or ANYTHING. Those were and ARE the facts... and the majority of ignorant Americans believing otherwise didn't suddenly alter reality and make their fallacious misunderstanding and ignorant beliefs true.

And humorously enough, given enough time for reality to settle in, guess what? The majority of Americans believe otherwise now. Gradual Illumination of the Mind.

This isn't an argument about keeping it out of schools... it's an argument against pretending that it's a remotely scientific claim. It's not. If you want to mention Intelligent Design AS WHAT IT REALLY IS, and NOT as a remotely scientific belief... be my guest.

John G. West, an executive with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank supporting intelligent design, issued a written statement welcoming Bush's remarks. "President Bush is to be commended for defending free speech on evolution, and supporting the right of students to hear about different scientific views about evolution," he said.

Intelligent Design IS NOT SCIENTIFIC. It's that kind of bullshit rhetoric from the ignorant Christian Fundamentalists that is really the root of the problem here. The failure to remotely comprehend what actually seperates religious belief from scientific reality.

Bush's comments were "irresponsible," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He said the president, by suggesting that students hear two viewpoints, "doesn't understand that one is a religious viewpoint and one is a scientific viewpoint." Lynn said Bush showed a "low level of understanding of science," adding that he worries that Bush's comments could be followed by a directive to the Justice Department to support legal efforts to change curricula.

Followed by another gemstone of ignorance:

In comments published last year in Science magazine, Bush said that the federal government should not tell states or school boards what to teach but that "scientific critiques of any theory should be a normal part of the science curriculum."

Say it again with me now... Intelligent Design is IN NO WAY Scientific.

Starting to understand the root of the problem here?

I hate to keep reposting the following quote by Stephen J. Gould, but it's so pertinent that I feel compelled to.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. [...] In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. - Stephen J. Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"Discover, May 1981

Why is this so hard for them to understand? As I said before, it all boils down a rather simple point... if you posit that the universe must have a creator, because complex things cannot exist without one, then the creator himself must have a creator, ad infinitum. This is the true definition of Irreducible Complexity. Being irrational and illogical, those of us with functioning brains move on to consider the next scientific possibility actually dealing with reality and not fantasy.